Stories

By now you know New Relic is great for monitoring the internals of your production applications... but did you know New Relic also has uptime monitoring? New Relic will ping your app every 30 seconds for availability, and correlate your availability to your monitored performance. Your app can appear 'down' to the outside world even when all your internal monitoring shows its up - because bad performance can make you drop incoming requests. Now you can see that happening.

Ilya Grigorik wrote in to tell us about this new non-blocking Ruby 1.9 Web Server he has been using in production with great results. If you're looking for a fast, asyncronous, stable web server, take a look.

Ben Johnson recently released Grapevine, a ruby server for monitoring message sources and alerting you about trending topics. If you'd like to see it in action, follow @github_rb on twitter - its trending github topics mentioned on twitter right now.

Michael van Rooijen Recently released version 3 of his Backup gem. Do you find yourself wishing you had a decent backup strategy for files and databases strewen across the various servers you log into? This gem is for you - just read the github readme page and you'll be hooked.

After moving to passenger from a pack of mongrels, do you find yourself missing some of the control you used to have with tools like monit or God? Alex Sharp recently released massenger_mon - a simple monitor for passenger that can stop and restart passenger processes if they exceed memory thresholds you specify.

Bill Harding was dismayed when he upgraded a rails app from 2 to 3 and saw his performance sink. He researched the slowdown, tuned REE's garbage collector, and ended up with something slightly faster than the original! Great advice for your rails application tuning.

And finally, Ruby5's own David Bock recently shared some quick mysql tuning advice for your Rails application - 4 parameters to tune on your rails/mysql database, and how to calculate what the correct values should be.